Biden Wants to Replace Government Fleet with Electric Vehicles

 

As of 2019, there were 645,000 vehicles in the federal government’s fleet

As reported by The Verge: President Joe Biden will start the process of phasing out the federal government’s use of gas-powered vehicles and replacing them with ones that run on electricity. The announcement is the fulfillment of a promise Biden made on the campaign trail to swap government fleet vehicles with American-made EVs.

“The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles, which we’re going to replace with clean electric vehicles made right here in America, by American workers,” Biden said during a briefing Monday announcing his “Buy American” executive order.

This is great news for US-based EV makers like Tesla, Rivian, and Lordstown, as well as legacy automakers like Ford and General Motors that are in the midst of multibillion-dollar investments in electric vehicle production.

As of 2019, there were nearly 650,000 vehicles in the federal government’s fleet, according to the General Services Administration. This includes 245,000 civilian vehicles, 173,000 military vehicles, and 225,000 post office vehicles. Those vehicles traveled 4.5 billion miles in 2019.

Biden also promised to create a system that offers rebates or incentives for consumers to replace gas cars with electric vehicles — though there aren’t any more details about that plan at this moment.

The details of both plans are still being worked out, but taken together, they represent a huge win for the EV investments made by automakers over the last several years. Ford has said it will spend $11 billion introducing a raft of new EVs, including the Mustang Mach-E and an electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck. GM has committed to spending $27 billion on electric and autonomous vehicles through 2025.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s remarkable stock market rally throughout 2020 has made it the most valuable automaker in the world, and its CEO Elon Musk the richest man on the planet.

Biden’s order may not be a direct win for Tesla, though, which has mostly focused on luxury and performance vehicles. Automakers that could benefit include Ford, which recently unveiled an electric version of its Transit vans, and GM, which just spun out a new company called BrightDrop focused on electric delivery vehicles.

One federal agency that could desperately use a new fleet of zero-emissions vehicles is the United States Postal Service. Hundreds of the agency’s mail trucks, which are manufactured by Northrop Grumman, have caught fire over the last several years, Vice recently reported. And the USPS’s deadline for official bids to make its next-generation mail truck was delayed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The program to replace the USPS’s current trucks was launched in 2015. But it has dragged on, forcing the postal service to keep its current trucks in service past their expected life span — despite the fact that they were introduced in the late 1980s and early ‘90s and lack features like air conditioning. Two of the original six companies have dropped out.

One of Biden’s goals is to create 1 million new jobs in the auto sector and to “position America to be the global leader in the manufacture of electric vehicles and their input materials and parts.” The president has said he will reach that goal by swapping out the government’s fleet for electric vehicles and through a “cash-for-clunkers”-style plan to ensure that every vehicle on the road is zero-emission by 2040. And he pledged to spend billions of dollars to add 550,000 EV charging stations in the US.

Biden has also said he supports the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles and would be open to considering new incentives to encourage car buyers to consider making the switch to electric. Former President Donald Trump tried to end the federal EV tax credit in his 2020 budget proposal but was not successful. Also under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency rolled back Obama-era emissions rules aimed at forcing the auto industry to manufacture less-polluting vehicles.

Biden has already taken steps to roll back Trump’s rollback (roll forward?) of the Obama-era emissions rules. On the day of his inauguration, Biden ordered federal agencies to revisit fuel efficiency standards as well as rules governing emissions from airplanes and appliance and building energy efficiency standards.

AlphaDogfight Should Convince the Air Force into Scaling AI Efforts

As reported by C4ISRNET: A few months ago, an AI pilot trounced an elite U.S. Air Force fighter pilot in a simulated dogfight. Sound like the stuff of sci-fi nightmares? If the Air Force continues on its current path, it is.

When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) concluded the AlphaDogfight competition in August, the Air Force experienced just how advanced AI systems have become.

AlphaDogfight pitted AI companies against one another’s dogfighting algorithms in a tournament-style competition, with the winner earning the chance to face off against a human fighter pilot.

The final tally: 5-0 in favor of the algorithmic “pilot.”

That result reinforces a trend in AI vs. human contests: Humans are losing their edge over machines in more and more tasks. And the trend is accelerating. It’s a question of when, not if, AI will change everything about the way the Air Force must do business.

To make that transition, the Air Force must accelerate its efforts to ready itself for the AI revolution. Otherwise, as Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown put it when calling for accelerating change: The service will lose.

Senior leaders such as Brown are saying the right things. The 2018 National Defense Strategy pushes for “an unmatched 21st century National Security Innovation Base.” The 2019 USAF Annex to the DoD AI Strategy and DoD Data Strategy recognize that AI will shape the battlefield of the 21st century, and the Air Force must invest in a data-centric ecosystem to facilitate AI capability. The recent National Defense Authorization Act even includes measures to direct focus on AI development in critical areas.

This direction has produced initiatives like the Air Force/MIT AI Accelerator, unit-level Spark Cells, the advanced battle management system (ABMS) initiative, and software development organizations such as Kessel Run and Kobayashi Maru.

These innovation hubs have incrementally proven out a series of best practices for changing the culture and practices of the service to prepare for the AI age.

Bold initiatives such as ABMS and JADC2 proclaim an envisioned service that leverages advanced analytics and decision intelligence algorithms to build situational awareness and the ability to act on it quickly, but how does the Air Force take the next step on its journey toward true AI-enabled capability (and prepare for the myriad business process changes that AI will bring), at a pace that will ensure it isn’t left behind? The answer is multifaceted and complex, but the first step should be to scale validated practices from Air Force innovation units and adopt a few overdue changes. These steps should focus on the areas any organization needs to make change to ready itself for AI: people, data and culture.

1. People: Reform talent management for digital skill sets.

In 2020, Kessel Run demonstrated effective ‘digital’ (referring to digital age skill sets critical to AI development like software development and data engineering) talent management by allowing an almost completely remote workforce, moving to virtual hiring, and finding new ways to foster the skills of its people. These moves allowed the organization to pull from a much larger talent pool.

To scale recruiting success demonstrated in the innovation ecosystem, the Air Force needs to allow remote work wherever feasible and maximize its participation in virtual recruiting events, hackathons, career fairs and tech conferences to build more bridges to these communities.

To scale success in building organic Air Force talent already in the service, the assignment selection process should (finally) improve how it tracks, incentivizes and assigns digital talent to appropriate organizations and positions. Tagging skillsets and providing financial compensation will improve retention. The service must also expand continuous learning opportunities outside the professional military education and technical schools.

2. Data: Set the stage for artificial intelligence by becoming data-centric

The service must accelerate its efforts to become more data-centric. The work and advocacy done by Kessel Run, Kobayashi Maru and the Air Force Chief Data Office’s VAULT program embody data-centric efforts. They emphasize data sharing and focus on enforcing healthy data management standards and practices.

Kessel Run’s ODIN effort, the suite of applications replacing the F-35 ALIS maintenance system, demonstrates the importance of valuing data. The ALIS system was plagued by insecurities, prone to error, and left much to be desired in the “user-friendly” category. Within a year of standing up a data team, which was empowered to make appropriate decisions about how to gather and utilize data, Kessel Run deployed a replacement suite of applications that strengthen the F-35 data ecosystem by enforcing standards, creating data stores for analytics, and optimizing maintenance schedules. The new system brings vast data improvements, leading to less maintenance time and more efficient scheduling.

The service faces big challenges to scaling data-driven systems across the Air Force, such as the availability and sharing of data across silos, and archaic methods used to manage huge data sets. Leaders must require and enforce informed data sharing in every digital system, support good IT infrastructure to enable data movement, hire and support software development capabilities to collect and analyze the data, and demand security to protect it. Integrated and operational AI is a system of systems, requiring much more than just algorithms — the right people, data, infrastructure and tools are needed to establish and maintain it.

3. Culture: Embrace and espouse an agile digital mindset

The Air Force innovation ecosystem has demonstrated the value in challenging the status quo, failing fast and iterating continuously. These components, which collectively comprise an agile mindset, have driven these units’ ability to deliver capability to the war fighter. The Next-Generation Air Defense Program recently reported to the world that 6th-gen fighters have been developed, simulated and flown on an incredibly condensed schedule, thanks to sophisticated digital engineering and modeling like that seen in modern Formula One racing design and engineering. These methods simulate real-world conditions with extraordinary fidelity and give designers and engineers the ability to run a huge number of experiments and simulations at an unprecedented pace. A mindset that combines the iterative power of the agile process and the transformational power of digital-first design and evaluation is foundational to integrating AI algorithms.

To scale this across the Air Force, leaders need to publicly and consistently embrace this agile mindset. This means consistently communicating Brown’s “Accelerate Change or Lose” effort and acquisitions chief Will Roper’s call for disruptive agility and a new digital paradigm for Air Force spending. It means taking a cue from Space Force Chief John Raymond’s public push for guardians to help him stand up a lean and agile service. It also means championing success stories like the innovation efforts by the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron at Beale, which implemented radically new processes and demonstrated an ability to provide solutions at speed in the recent U-2 mid-flight software update and AI co-pilot demonstrations.

To recognize and reward these efforts, commanders must discover, then insist on metrics that demonstrate solving problems iteratively with digital solutions, and track speed and efficacy of capability delivery.

The service cannot lose this competition. In an era of renewed great power competition, when peer competitors China and Russia are clearly prioritizing AI development, and the capabilities that come with it, that could be a fatal mistake.

Capt. Jazmin Furtado is an Air Force acquisitions officer, and data science and artificial intelligence leader. She is the current portfolio lead for Wing C2 data at Kessel Run, and liaison to the Air Force and MIT partnership AI Accelerator.

Capt. Chris Dylewski is a pilot and member of the 56th Fighter Wing at Luke Air Force Base, where he leads the ThunderBolt Spark Cell.

The views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force, DoD or U.S. Government. The authors would like to thank Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, Douglass Drakeley, Brett Darcey, and George Hellstern for their advice and counsel.